AI-Generated Video Falsely Shared as One of Iran Downing American F-35 Jet

The video is an AI-generated one and does not show a real F-35 jet.

A video which shows man holding a torch to show a downed American fighter jet is being shared on social media, where users have linked it to the ongoing Iran-US-Israel conflict in West Asia.

The claim: The 15-second clip is being shared with this text, "#Iran hit the 5th generation F-35 fighter of the #US Air Force An American F-35 fighter made an emergency landing at an air base in the Middle East after coming under Iranian fire, sources told CNN (sic)."

(Archived versions of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here and here.)

Is is true?: No, the claim is false, as the video is an AI-generated one.

How did we find out the truth?: We looked for CNN's news reports about such an incident, as the claim cited it as a source.

• The news organisation had published a report about a US F-35 fighter jet making an emergency landing at a US military air base in the Middle East after being struck by "what is believed to be Iranian fire."

• The CNN report made it evident that the plane had made a successful landing, and had not crashed in the manner that was seen in the viral claim.

Is that an F-35?: We looked for the fighter jet's official photos on its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin's website, and saw that they differed from the jet seen in the claim.

Is it AI?: Since there were multiple factual issues with the video, we ran it through Hive Moderation's AI detection tool.

• It said that the video was an AI-generated on with 99.9 percent confidence, noting that it might have been made using Google's Veo.

• We then ran the video through Google's SynthID detection, which tells whether a video was or was not made using Google's AI tools.

• It said that the video was edited or generated using Google's AI, and that SynthID detected "a digital watermark in both the audio and the visual components of the clip."

Conclusion: An AI-generated video is being shared to claim that it shows an F-35 fighter jet that was downed by Iranian forces.

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